Wednesday, 4 November 2015

I'm playing with 3d Coat for some time already. I began touse itsomewhereat the beginning ofthis year. I started carefully, making some details for models that I made in MAX, damages, scratches, wrinkles for textile materials and so on. Probably would have used it more if I had more free time. I'm finally finished with one project on which I worked for about six months so now I'm back on my private project which I use for learning and experimenting with various new software. I always really wanted to make some serious characters in 3d so I decided to make crew for my tank. I made face and tanker cap and then retopology in 3d Coat. It's very intuitive and user friendly application, you almost don't need tutorials for it. Then I imported everything in MAX and made rest of the stuff there. Later I decided that shirt and glasses need more details so I again played a little bit in 3d Coat. At the end baked everything in MAX. Now follows part that I love the most, texturing. I will probably use 3d Coat also, since Substance Painter is not entirely ready for action. Later, I plan to make entire body, leather jacket, tanker overall, boots and so on, but first I want to see how this will turn out. For now, I'm pretty happy with the result. Entire model has only 8883 polys.

Here is fully textured version. I used my standard workflow, some parts are painted in Mudbox and completed in Photoshop. At the beginning I tried painting in 3d Coat but materials are just too generic, you can make your own materials, stencils and brushes but I would need some more time to do it so I returned to my well confirmed method of making textures. This particular model uses diffuse, specular, glossiness and reflection mask maps, of course there is normal bump that is already visible on the previous screenshot.

Below is completed low poly model using baked normal maps. His Tokarev pistol is missing but I'll make one later. It will use his own texture. Altogether it has 26000 polygons.

Here is textured version. Next I will be working on skeleton and rigging, so he can take some poses.

Saturday, 24 October 2015

Here are some weapon designs that I'll be needing for my personal project. First I started to draw, but then by chance browsing the references I realized that it will be much faster and at the end more realistic if I would use real weapons and other technology parts from photos. Of coursethere werea lot ofadjustmentsto make things sit in the right position. Anyway I'm pretty happy with the result. Now when everything is defined it will be much easier to make 3d model and some nice textures.

Below the concept is high polygon model of the weapon, and below high poly would be finished low poly model. I used some simple materials just to accent material differences, real textures on low poly model, of course, will be more distinctive. I hope that I'll have more free time to finish all weapons from this concepts. Eventually, watching this first weapon I realized that it looks like some modernized version of VSS Vintorez, so that's how the rifle got a new name in this 3d version. It was also fun to play with logotypes of companies that are producing such weapons.

It's been a while since the last post but I'll keep this particular one alive until I make all models from concepts and some extras. I'm updating it with the high poly model of Electro Laser. It uses just simple materials for now. As you can see I made a lot of changes but it still uses the same sporty handle. Other parts are slightly different. A lot of time has passed so new ideas emerged. Anyway I think it looks better this way.

Friday, 13 March 2015

After almost eight months I'm back on my private project. Evolution of ideas is almost usual and it comes with the lapse of time. Like the caption suggests I'll be showing 3d model of T34 tank used by different armies, from WW2 to modern times. I picked only four users that left a mark in the history of my country. Otherwise the list of users of this legendary tank is really long, it was used by over 50 armies across the globe. Even today 27 countries still use it for different purposes such as military reserve or infantry backup vehicles.

Just a tank has around 30 000 polys, half of it is used by tracks. I made them more detailed because I plan to create some animation with camera close-up on tracks later.

This one is Soviet original without any additional elements, that part will come later, for now I got only hi poly models(extra barrels on back, ammo boxes, tent roll, field armor,etc.) but I'm still thinking about final appearance. I think it will look like this one from real photos of that time.

Every tank will have extra machine gun on the turret, characteristic for army to which it belongs. For now I got only model of M2 Browning without texture which you can check in the post below.

Other variants will come soon.

Here is additional machine gun that will be mounted on the turret of Soviet version. DT(Degtyaryova Tankovy) is in fact the main machine gun installed inside the T34 tank. My version uses original sight that was used inside tank, it probably doesn't make sense outside but it looks kind of cool. Original DTs mounted on turret of T 26 tanks looked like this and had been used as a anti-aircraft machine gun.

Here is textured low poly model of DT. Model has 14032 polygons. Second one is anti aircraft version.

You can also check textured M2 Browning for Croatian version...

...and whole tank with additional equipment.

At last, here is a Soviet version with shaped charges metal fence "bed springs armor" like on the reference photo above. I also added two reflector lights which were used on T26 tanks in combination with anti aircraft DT machinegun.

Yesterday I found one very interesting and promising texture painting software, Substance painter. How I don't really like my DT machine gun texture I decided to retexture it in this new application. When I was done and finally happy with the result I realized that I can't do much with my new texture. I tried to export it into PS layers but what I got was unusable, so I decided to make some nice render and soon I found out that this isn't possible either. Anyway, good old Print Screen never disappoints. It's obvious that this really nice piece of software is still in developing process and I

sincerely hope that it will be fully functional soon. Here is the result.